The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years.

But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.

DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department with about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,'” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

Kristina Trotta, another former DEP employee who worked in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a 2014 staff meeting. “We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” she said.

This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the DEP’s director, according to former DEP employees. Gov. Scott, who won a second term in November, has repeatedly said he is not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

Vinyard has since resigned. Neither he nor his successor, Scott Steverson, would comment for this article.

“DEP does not have a policy on this,” the department’s press secretary, Tiffany Cowie, wrote in an email. She declined to respond to three other emails requesting more information.

“There’s no policy on this,” wrote Jeri Bustamante, Scott’s spokeswoman, in an email.

But four former DEP employees from offices around the state say the order was well known and distributed verbally statewide.

One former DEP employee who worked in Tallahassee during Scott’s first term in office, and asked not to be identified because of an ongoing business relationship with the department, said staffers were warned that using the terms in reports would bring unwanted attention to their projects.

“We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it,” the former employee said.

Former DEP attorney Byrd said it was clear to him this was more than just semantics.

“It’s an indication that the political leadership in the state of Florida is not willing to address these issues and face the music when it comes to the challenges that climate change present,” Byrd said.

“Let’s look at what we’ve accomplished: We’ve had significant investments in beach re-nourishment, with flood mitigation,” Scott said as he changed the subject to other environmental projects, a talking point from his 2014 reelection campaign.

Scott wouldn’t say if the agency plans for or believes in global warming, but said he’s a problem-solver. Asked if he thought global warming was a problem, Scott refused to say.

When he first ran for office in 2010, Scott said “I have not been convinced” about man-made causes of global warming. He said he needed “something more convincing than what I’ve read” to change his mind. The first-term GOP governor stopped talking about global warming during his reelection campaign against Democrat Charlie Crist, who was aided by a nearly $18 million effort from billionaire investor-turned-climate-change activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action Florida group.

“I’m not a scientist,” Scott, echoing other Republicans, repeatedly said in 2014 when asked about climate change.

Notwithstanding Scott’s denial, the number of current and former Florida DEP employees quoted in the report as confirming the existence of such a policy makes it hard to believe that this is a completely false report. No doubt, this has never been a written policy of any kind regarding this but it’s not hard to believe at all that, from the time Scott’s appointee took over the department, that there has been an unwritten policy designed to discourage employees of the department from emphasizing “climate change” and “global warming” in the material that they produced as part of their jobs on a regular basis, even if there was a legitimate scientific basis to do so. Given the fact that, as the report goes on to note, the reports that have been produced by the Florida DEP in the years since Scott became Governor don’t use terms like “climate change” or “global warming” at all, it certainly seems plausible to assume that this is the result of a policy of some kind, regardless of whether it is “official” or has ever been written down. Notwithstanding the fact that Florida is one of the states that is likely to be most directly impacted by things such as rising sea levels in decades to come, then, it appears to be the policy of the department charged with protecting Florida’s environment has been barred from discussing what most scientists believe to be the primary threats to the environment in the coming decades. That seems both stupid and shortsighted.

None of this is surprising, of course. Conservatives have been engaged in a war against the science of climate change for the better part of a decade now, if not longer, to the point where it is seemingly required for Republican politicians to either deny the science behind climate change or to dodge the question as best they can. As I’ve noted before, this seems to me to be the wrong way to approach this issue. While science is a democracy, the fact that the vast majority of scientists who have studied the issue agree that human activity has an impact on global climate, and that average global temperatures have been steadily rising, seems to be rather in contvertible. Denying those realities just tends to make politicians look as silly as the people who continue to content that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that there is no basis for Evolutionary Theory. As I’ve noted before, the science of climate change shouldn’t be a matter of political contention. Instead, we can and should have legitimate debates about what policies are appropriate to respond to it. Those debates are important, and are certainly less silly than banning people who work for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection from even mentioning the words “climate change.”

The wording that was promoted was “Nuisance flooding”. Think about that BS for a second – they briefly acknowledge it as a problem yet completely downplay it at the same time. “The Atlantic showing up in your backyard on a regular basis? Why my good man, ’tis but a trifling nuisance! Don’t worry at all” Not to mention what that categorization could have on insurance claims….

I find it interesting how, across the country and in the states, the Republican Party is now all in on uber political correctness and in Sovietizing discussions of history and current issues. People get ready, Americans are poised to hand the entire federal government over to the Republican Party.

Speech codes (eg. safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc.) happen for the left, in general, in college. Basically you have 20-year old semi-adults who have been the victims of sexual violence or intolerance trying to figure out how their experiences fit into a world that is generally indifferent to suffering. Thus, trigger warnings and safe spaces. Then the 20-year old grows older and learns how to handle what happened, which is why speech codes are a relic of the college years.

Contrast that to the right, where the opposite happens. The older you get, the more you need to be told that you are unopposed, that nobody suffers because of you, that nothing you do is contradicted by facts. Thus bans on mentioning climate change or teachers brandishing their credentials or the basic groupthink of the conservative kingdom.

The authors of AGW were mathematicians, and it is based upon statistics not science. These are the same guys that assured everybody there could be no housing crisis. Thier understanding of science is about a high school level.

In nature, there are feedback loops, and you do not find “run away” anything without a catastrophic event. The dinosaurs may have gone extinct, but it would have taken a long time without an asteroid impact. The “hockey stick” graph was the first indication these guys were clueless.

The Earth’s axis has a wobble like a top as it slows down. This wobble causes the Earth to have a different angle to the sun for thousands of years. The seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis for the same reason.

As with the seasons, there are ice ages, and these will occur due to the how the Earth works. This cannot be changed. The climate does change hourly, daily, and yearly, and these are due to many factors. One huge factor is the oceans.

The oceans are vast, and they are great at holding heat. As an experiment, fill your bathtub with water and turn on the heater. It is going to take a long time for the air to heat the water, but if you fill the tub with hot water, it will warm the air.

The AGW mathematicians did not understand any of this or any of the other science they jabber on about. In about 2005, their models began to fall apart, but like the housing market mathematicians, they thought they were experts. In the summer of 2010, the AGW models totally fell apart. CO2 had skyrocketed, but the predicted temperatures were not occurring. Each year since, it has been getting worse.

Warming was dropped, and it was replaced with climate change because the warming was not working. AGW is finished, and CO2 based nonsense is dying. The only science is that CO2 is a wonderful life giving gas. Without CO2, life would not exist.

The CO2 levels during the time of the dinosaurs were much higher, and the planet was full of lush green vegetation. This is how the dinosaurs were able to grow so large. The plants provided food and oxygen.

If you are familiar with “Peak Oil”, it has finally gone away. The Peak Oilers could not fathom the vast size of the Earth, and many of the people pushing “Peak Oil” are also pushing AGW. Somehow, nobody remembers they were pushing that crap, and they will have a sudden memory lapse shortly.

One thing that you will not see is any actual hard scientist defending any of this. You will hear non-scientist spouting scientific sounding terms or concepts, but none of them can place them into the full context. You will also hear about 97% of climate scientists preferring AWG over Colgate.

In the hard sciences, there is no popularity contest. Einstein’s theories have been validated. String Theory has not been validated. I prefer String Theory, but that is tough. In physics, Einstein is the law until something else is proven to be correct. Science is like a track meet. The winner is the person who crosses the finish line first not the most popular.

AGW has failed so badly that the dire predictions have now been pushed 20 – 30 into the future. The North Pole is not going to melt for a few years, and the polar bears have been granted a stay of execution. You can still buy beachfront property for now.

As the excuses fail, the extensions will get longer and longer, and the excuses will get weirder and wilder. If you have children, you can imagine the excuses – dogs, monsters, space aliens, etc.

Here, CO2 levels are rising, but they cannot find the corresponding heat. Apparently, the dog ate the predicted temperature. They are quietly de-emphasizing the CO2 – temperature linkage, but not everybody has gotten the memo. The problem is that there is no science for CO2 causing climate change without the linkage or with a miniscule linkage.

CO2 causes miniscule heat added to the Earth. The heat added through additional CO2 would take tens of thousands of years to have any impact under unchanging conditions. Therefore, CO2 has no impact on climate. Time is my friend. AGW will eventually come close to this conclusion, but there will be much gnashing of teeth.

El Nino, la Nina, and Gulf Stream are three known ocean currents that affect climate changes. There are probably many more we have not discovered, and they all affect the weather through heat. (Remember the bathtub.) The ocean temperature needs to increase, but the oceans are large. Imagine how long it takes to heat a large pot of water, and you begin to see the problem.

The sizes, numbers, and time scales are staggeringly large, and most people cannot fathom how large. The original predictions were years, and they are now decades. These will fail also. If any of their predictions were to occur, it would take a lot longer than any of them could imagine.

If you were to take my earlier comments from years ago, you would notice they are consistent. I expand upon previous points and add new points, but I am consistent. I really do not have anything new to add.

For years, you could not get the Peak Oil enthusiasts to understand that the Earth was far larger than they could fathom, and there was more undiscovered oil than they could imagine. Even as the known world supply was increasing, they clung to the hope that there was a counting error.

I would suggest bookmarking this post and checking it in six months or a year. The science may take time to get out to everybody, but I have time. Science has not been kind to the AGW crowd. The debate is over. AGW is done – “stick a fork in it.”

I read that a couple times, but I can’t find where you linked to credible scientific organizations to back up your claims. You probably left those out by accident, so they should be easy to add in a follow up, I’m sure everyone here would find the articles interesting.

Actually, I have been through this little dance before. The Peak Oilers were the last idiots who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to reality. None of this is super secret knowledge. It is all open source, but you do need a little scientific knowledge.

I think that the main motive behind this action is the preservation of real estate values. Florida is low and flat. The value of beachfront land goes down when the land is submerged. Your ability to get a good price for your land will decline if buyers see the state being worried about the ocean. Long ago when I lived in Cleveland there was a western suburb with showcase homes on a cliff on Lake Erie. When a report came in that the cliff was not permanent, the suburb banned for sale signs to prevent a crash in prices. When looking for Florida property, caveat emptor and imagine the ocean raising a bit.

I have been reading and studying this subject for over 15 years.I do not have a bibliography of every article, book, documentary, etc. that I have gleaned information from over the years. I cannot provide you with a link of somebody else’s conclusions. You can do your own research, and you can come to your own conclusions.

On the other hand, you can be like the Peak Oilers and be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth. I suspect that many of the OTB commenters were Peak Oilers, and some of them may still be holding out hope. You might be one for all I know.

Sorry, Mike, you can’t blame this on religion. Blame this on Exxon, the Koch brothers, and the fossil fuels industry who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fund climate science denial. Mammon, not God, is at fault here.

Man that was quite the word salad of pseudoscience. The AGW guys are not “mathematicians”. They are climate scientists who study this stuff on a big scale for decades. So the whole premise of your word salad is garbage. They may be wrong in some aspects, but they aren’t guessing.

So much wrong, but here is my favorite bit:

Warming was dropped, and it was replaced with climate change because the warming was not working. AGW is finished, and CO2 based nonsense is dying. The only science is that CO2 is a wonderful life giving gas. Without CO2, life would not exist.

Warming was dropped because idiots like you kept insisting that anything other than warm temperatures all the time everywhere disproved global warming. CO2 is a life-giving gas. It’s also a greenhouse gas. It’s one of the reasons you don’t freeze to death at night. To much of it and the planet will warm. Not even the biggest climate skeptics dispute this point.

Anyway, returning to the subject of this post: don’t you know that global warming is like the ravenous blugbatter beat of Traal? If you pretend you can’t see it, it will go away.

So have many actual climate scientists. And about 97% of them disagree with you. That certainly doesn’t mean you’re wrong, of course, but it does suggest that nobody should take some anonymous commenter’s word for it. Particularly one who doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence, and furthermore makes many provably false statements.

Back in the mid 80s PBS did a big documentary with James Burke about global warming.

I remember quite well the predictions. The east coast would undergo severe weather, the mid part of the country would bake and the west coast would have mild changes, the biggest being in the bay area.

I thought to myself then, “I guess the good news about GW is that San Francisco will be habitable in 50 years.”

Tasty bits, lets say you’re correct and climate changes all the time. I am sitting here in LA where 15,000 years ago, 100 feet of ice would be over my head.

The most compelling evidence is that, while climate does change over time, its happening MUCH faster now. Its hard to argue away the ice core samples which corelate high levels of CO2 with past eras of warming.

It may be hard to quantify the anthropomorphic effect of man on climate (is it a 5% effect? 10%) but there is no question the planet is warming faster than it has in the past. Wobble or no wobble.

Sorry to burst you bubble, but the cut and paste job is from myself on another site. It is an entire original composition. Obviously, the scientific research was not done by me. I realize that you may find it startling to learn that there are still a few people who construct original thoughts, but it is true.

@TastyBits:
Dude, a scientist can point to sources. Simple enough. You’ve been asked and asked and asked, and all you’ve got is, “I’ve studied this.” Right. Unlike the thousands of scientists who all say you’re wrong.

I would not take my word for anything. You would be a damn fool to believe something you read on a blog. What you should do is to find out why I would write what I write, and you can google most of it. Some of it you might have even learned in science class.

You might also want to look at the dates of those papers that the climate scientists wrote. You may notice that most of them have gone to ground. They have serious problems, and they know it.

Thank you for starting your post with this. I was able to just go ahead and skip the rest.

@michael reynolds:

You right. I am wrong. Just like I have been wrong in the past. Oh wait, …

You realize that asserting that in the past there were peak oilers and you totes proved them wrong, doesn’t actually convince us you are correct, do you?

Guys, remember that one time I proved I was hung like a donkey? Oh you weren’t there and you don’t know what I”m referring to? Well, I totally did prove it. Do your own research if you don’t believe me.

The problem is that the amount of heat for the CO2 to trap to cause the predicted effects would take a long, long time, and that would be under unchanging conditions (no seasons, hurricanes, etc.). The oceans are heatsinks.

Now, concrete and steel are also heatsinks, and they do affect the local climate. I am not sure how they compare to stone, and I do not know if anybody has studied the long term effects of modern cities.

You can take what I have written, and you can research it for yourself. You can then come to your own conclusion, or you can believe what somebody has told you. If you choose to believe somebody, do not believe me.

I am not really interested in adherents, mine or others.

The Peak Oil example is to help those who previously were blind followers.

@Neil Hudelson: Maybe. Still, it’s kinda sad that on a forum operated by a moderate republican and a non-tinfoil libertarian, the only right of center commenter who is not an absolute lunatic is Hal_10000.

AGW Theory is based upon rising CO2 levels affecting Temperature, and this was validated by a computer (mathematical) model. The model is not a nice to have item. It is a must have item, and it is not a little broken. It is a lot broken.

They could rework the theory to devise another method to validate it, but it all has to fit together. You do not just pull something out of your behind.

@TastyBits:
I have no idea what you think you’re talking about. All I know of you is that you’re a crank who hangs out at Dave’s blog and issues non sequiturs that people tend to tactfully ignore.

And, by the way, here’s a thought: you’re simultaneously trashing me and relying on me as a source of your credibility. Very much what I expect, and entirely representative of your contributions to this thread.

Yes. There will come a day when Peak Oil is reached, but that day is a long, long, long way off. There is a lot more oil on the ground than most people can imagine, and the oil that seems impossible to get at today will be reached in the future.

I would beg to differ, but @Zachriel does always come back with relevant points. While we disagree on most subjects, he/she seems to be able to formulate an original thought without reverting to a link fest. In the event I want to verify anything, I can do my own research, but I have found @Zachriel to be honest.

The reason for the sharp upturn is a mathematical error. They figured this out several years ago, and this is why they stopped pushing it. It is out there somewhere, but you can believe what you want.

To my knowledge, there is no good proxy for temperature data. If there is, it is recent. Tree rings can be used for moisture, and that could be a proxy for rainfall. Outside of that there are numerous problems with the data.

None of this matters because the models do not work, and as long as they do not work, they cannot validate the theory.

You see this is all that matters. The AGW computer (mathematical) models do not work, and without them AGW does not work. It is a theory sitting on blocks, and it is going nowhere. This is what you fail to grasp.

If you really understood the subject matter a little better, you would might reconsider who is the clown, but you might notice that you are in the company of politicians, political scientists, and fiction writers. The science people keep slipping out the back door.

For the rising CO2 levels, the model predicts a corresponding temperature, but the temperature has not matched the model for 10 years. The difference has been significant. They admitted there was a problem, and they went back into the lab to figure out what it is.

They are looking at different reasons for the lull, but none of this was predicted.

Please….do not talk about climate change or AGW.
Reminds me of Bush 43 who, in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, kept repeating over and over that the countries economic fundamentals were strong. Soon after that the GDP contracted 9% in a single quarter. The McCain started repeating it.
Tea Baggers are really the only group in the entire friggin’ world that does not believe in the science of AGW. Even many moderate Republicans believe in science. (Remember that Nixon created the EPA.) Oh, how far the Republican ideological right has fallen.
Tea Baggers are such incredible dupes that they are apparently they are unmoved by the fact that one of the leading deniers has just been outed as receiving over a million dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry…including the Koch Brothers.http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-change-denier-willie-soon-funded-energy-industryThere’s nothing like a bunch of dupes in denial.

For the rising CO2 levels, the model predicts a corresponding temperature, but the temperature has not matched the model for 10 years. The difference has been significant. They admitted there was a problem, and they went back into the lab to figure out what it is.

Link? I’ll continue to assume the lack of evidence on your part to be an actual admission that you know you can’t back your claims up, and they are garbage.

@michael reynolds:
Shuler’s point at that link is spot on…and something I’ve been saying for some time.
It really doesn’t matter the cause…the fact is things are heating up and we can already see the effects. It’s already costing us more money out of our pockets. TeenyTinyBoyBits can whine and complain and cherry pick data all he wants…it doesn’t matter. Food already costs more because of it. Building codes have already changed because of it. Power companies are already surcharging because of it.
Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why insurers are devout believers in science. Ask yourself why the military services are devout believers in science. Ask yourself why the fossil fuel industry is a denier.
I can tell you that as a professional in the building industry I have already learned to stop worrying and love climate change. My colleagues and I look forward to accepting your hard-earned money. I’m thinking about charging science deniers, like TeenyTinyBoyBits, double.

@TastyBits:
The reason you didn’t provide a link to your original piece is that it shows your arguments being shredded. The reason you refuse to link to scientific support for your claims is that no such support exists. The reason you ‘re having a hard time here is that you aren’t very smart.

What the link is saying is that the models do not work, but he knows why they do not work. I disagree with him, but I am impressed that he finally discovered the oceans. You may agree with him, but the models are broke. If he can fix them, he needs to fix them.

I never really thought about linking to until somebody asked for it, and you beat me to it. Nobody here has engaged me in anything. On that link, @Zachriel did engage, and there are earlier threads that are probably better. @steve and I have engaged on the topic, but @Zachriel seems to bring something new each time.

The reason you ‘re having a hard time here is that you aren’t very smart.

Is that really the best you can do? What’s next? “You’re a poo poo head.”

Your acolytes must expect better, or do they just throw you a pity thumbs up.

Try this:

“The reason you ‘re having a hard time here is that you have your head shoved too far up your ass.”

Like I said, you might agree with him. I do not, and I really do not feel like getting into a scientific debate.

In the future, you will know that the models do not work, and you will know what they think the problem is. There is a working hypothesis, and in science, this is not necessarily the end of the world. They may have gotten it mostly right.

They may need to work this into the models, and then, they will be able to validate the theory. I do not believe that they will succeed, but that is beside the point. If the model works, it works.

@TastyBits:
Yeah…you are claiming to know more than 97% of the qualified scientists on the planet, yet refuse to provide even the slimmest glimmer of proof or back-up…for a position parroting the fossil fuel industry. Did you get your funding? Or are you just another dupe?
And I’m pathetic.

I provided a link proving the models are broken. This link was not from the “fossil fuel industry”. If you are not going to believe an AGW theorist, I am not sure who you will believe.

Everything else he had to say was his opinion, and it is a hypothesis at best. If he wants to use that as the reason why the models do not work, he has to include it in the models, and then he has to produce models that fully work.

It is that simple. You, like the famous fiction writer, can call me a poopie head or whatever, but it does not alter reality.

Have you ever heard of Michael Mann? Did you take a look at the source? You cannot be serious. I will assume that you were joking, or you were trying to lure me into a trap. You could not possibly be that stupid.

@michael reynolds: Glo-bull warming is a lie, a hoax, a fraud, a scam, a Trojan Horse hiding socialism in its underbelly, a ruse, etc.

This has nothing to do with my religious beliefs. It has everything to do with the fact that I was not born yesterday and am not a rube who just fell off a turnip truck. Glo-bull warming simply is not true so I salute Gov. Scott refusing to allow government employees (whose salaries are paid for with tax dollars) to continue to perpetrate this fraud.

He does not use the words “broken”. Instead, he uses “warming more slowly”, “slowing of warming over the past decade”, “climate models do not currently capture”. The words in between are the reasons why he has to use the phrases in quotes.

What he is trying to say is that the oceans are capturing a lot of heat, but the atmosphere will catch up in a few years.

@TastyBits: I’m not saying the models are broken. I’m saying they are fraudulent.

Many of the thermometers are placed near artificial heat sources at official climate measuring stations. Many of the monitoring stations in Siberia were taken off line in order to make the world mean temperature seem like it is higher. The entire premise is fraudulent. It not a mistake – it’s all a great scam.

Suggesting the model is merely broken is to stipulate that these folks are acting in good faith in the first place. They are not. They are using the environment to impose socialism through the back door.

When the USSR disbanded the worldwide communist movement did not go away. THey rebranded themselves as environmentalists. They’re watermelons – green on the outside, but red on the inside.

The models aren’t broken – they were never intended to accurately measure or predict anything. THey are designed hoaxes in order to further an agenda.

I do not have a side. I tend to offend both sides, and I really do not care. The right is usually not as much fun except on foreign policy. (Try making a credible case for President Bush being a coward.)

It is late, and I am not going to get into a side debate. I am only going to do this once, and it will be the short version. It would all need to be fleshed out into a proper argument.

Iraq was a multi-generation project, and any idiot knew it. (I would throw in a few jabs about the idiot shot depending upon how I was feeling.) It was going to take US involvement for 50 years at least. He should have signed long term leases for bases and installed a government for the long term. Instead, he hastily tried to get the place fixed enough to pass it off to the next guy, and he let the next guy make the hard decisions.

I do not necessarily like President Obama, but I believe in fair play. He got stuck with a shitty hand, and he dealt with it as he saw fit. If the Bush supporters have a problem, they should take it up with Bush.

This is not usually my opening salvo, but I have no problem going after right wing icons – even the most saintly.

I am not a mind reader. Therefore, I cannot discern anybody’s motive. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and I will assume that they were like all humans. They made mistakes. I have made them, and I am certain you have made them.

I often have to reevaluate the reasons for my beliefs. Have you ever had to toss one of your favorite ideas onto the trash heap because it could not withstand a reevaluation? It sucks.

I am anti-blame President Obama for things that were not his fault, and I am really anti-keep-on-blaming President Obama for things that were not his fault but he did what he said he was going to do when he was running for president. And by the way, he beat the crap out of the other guy who said he was going to do it the way you (anti-Obama people) wanted it done. I start getting really, really anti-keep-on-blaming President Obama for not doing what your guy could have done.

On other issues, it is the other way around. I may be defending your side because I agree with you, or I may be defending your side because it is being treated unfair.

@James P: Many of the thermometers are placed near artificial heat sources at official climate measuring stations. Many of the monitoring stations in Siberia were taken off line in order to make the world mean temperature seem like it is higher.

Statisticians have studied the issue and found that it doesn’t affect the overall temperature trend. See, for instance, Wickham, et al., Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average using Rural Sites Identified from MODIS Classifications, Geoinformatics & Geostatistics 2013.

@TastyBits: ” I am only going to do this once, and it will be the short version.”

If only that was true… a hundred blithering messages later.

At least you’re showing James P. how a good troll does it — singleminded devotion to a crackpot notion, rather than simply attempting to offend on as many fronts as possible. This way we are forced to deal with the idea that you actually believe some of the crap you spew, as opposed to JP who is clearly out only for attention.

Maybe. Still, it’s kinda sad that on a forum operated by a moderate republican and a non-tinfoil libertarian, the only right of center commenter who is not an absolute lunatic is Hal_10000.

I’m not gonna speak for Hal…. but after debating with/against him for the past 12 years on different sites – mostly RTFTLC – I can say comfortably that he is, if nothing else, not crazy. Sure, we disagree because he’s center-right, and I’m center-left (and moving further left every year due to GOP craziness). But the GOP needs guys like Hal. Problem is that any time a guy like Ted Cruz or a woman like Sarah Palin shows up as the face of the GOP, they alienate the guys like Hal (and James Joyner). However, tribalism doesn’t allow them to leave the team altogether. So they’ll vote for the occasional Dem while holding their noses. That’s what differentiates them from the GOP “base”.

When you call it nonsense, you make my ears perk up. Do you know it is nonsense because you understand the science, or have you read somebody who said it was nonsense?

I try to stick to the science. Using the modern scientific method, it relies upon objective validation. There are many honest scientists working to validate a theory they honestly believe is valid, but there are some outliers.

Al Gore is not a scientist, and I will keep my opinion of him to myself.

I really do not need to obfuscate a scientific debate or discussion with side trips into conjecture. I have enough trouble staying on point. I realize there is a monetary element, but it is not germane to anything I have written. As to the “impose socialism” portion, you got me. The floor is all yours.

You can have at it. I am tired, and I do not really care about political arguments.

Are you the second smartest behind the famous fiction writer? I was impressed with the variety, but then, you fell back and called me a “troll”. For all the thumbs up you all throw to the famous fiction writer, he should teach you all how to use a thesaurus, but you were far more creative than your fellow commenters.

You definately get a B+ for style. Unfortunately, I must give you an overall D- because you were intentionally misleading or you are unintentionally stupid. You know the quote was not about my original comment. It was about a specific comment, and that specific comment is closed.

@TastyBits: You made a comment on the other site about Y2K being a hoax. That shows how clueless you are about computer systems. Y2K was going to be an absolute mess. Thankfully people running major corporations and government institutions took the situation seriously and dumped a lot of time and money on fixing the problem. So since we took a problem seriously and fixed it in your world that makes it a hoax. I can tell you I personally know a few people who were hired specifically because of their knowledge of old languages like Cobol and their jobs were to fix the coding.

Even with all the time and money spent to fix the issue there were still a lot of problems that occurred. Fortunately those problems were handled quickly because most were predicted and plans were in place.

The only peak oilers I remember where those that claimed the days of cheap oil were ending soon and that is apparent if you look at where we’re looking for oil now (tar sands etc really energy intensive means of obtaining oil).

I am long past the Y2K debate, but do you really believe that all the COBOL code was remediated? I do not recall ever calling it a hoax. Just because people are wrong does not mean that it is a hoax. There was a reason none of the hardware guys ever blinked. A computer has no problem going from 99 to 100.

@TastyBits: I know very little about science – I admit that. However, I don’t need to know anything about science because this has nothing to do with science.

It is a scam pure and simple. I can recognize a Trojan Horse without being an expert on carpentry. Glo-bull warming is a pure Trojan Horse, however instead of concealing Greeks in its underbelly it is concealing socialism.

I don’t understand very much about science. Neither do the proponents of glo-bull warming. It is purely a political issue, not a scientific one. Therefore, I don’t see my lack of scientific knowledge of understanding as particularly relevant.

I can recognize a scam when I see one and this is the mother of all scams.

If you were to do any research into the subject, you would learn that there is science underlying climate science, and there are actual climate scientists. Most of them take their work seriously, and though I disagree with them, that does not mean that they should be abused by people who refuse to learn about the subject matter.

The subject has gotten politicized, and many of these honest hard working folks would like to concentrate on the science. There are some outliers, but they exist in any group. I am sure they exist in whatever your type of work is, and I can assure you that I can trash it.

I am going to stop right here before I am banned for life, but be certain, I am flabbergasted that anybody would proudly proclaim their ignorance about a subject before proceeding to pronounce a judgement upon it.

You have almost no clue what you’re talking about. You have no idea how low or high level programming works. In the early days you did everything you could to reduce memory usage and dedicating 2 spots to a year used half the memory of using a full 4 spots (which was massively important when you were working with 4 KB of memory for the entire program). Even today in PLCs and such you have to be careful about memory usage.

Your hardware only flips to 2000 because it was programmed to do so on a low level. Otherwise it’s purely mechanical.

It was NEVER A HARDWARE PROBLEM. The problem was in the software running ON THE HARDWARE. Meaning without software the hardware doesn’t work and it’s the software that had the shortcut in date usage.

Frankly most of the people programming at the time never expected their programs to still be in use +20 years later. Not all the old code was fixed as not all of it had the problem. There for a while though if you knew fortran, cobol, etc you could of made a killing fixing that stuff.

Y2K is a rare example of humanity realizing a problem and fixing it before anything blew up. There were hiccups and issues but backup plans covered that well.

For a computer, there is no buffer overflow when going from 99 to 100.

01100011 (99)
+ 1
————–
01100100 (100)

You are using no extra space. (This is only to illustrate the concept. The memory registers may be configured differently.)

This will not catch every case, but it explains why there was not a very large problem. It also points to a problem when there will be an overflow date.

I was there. I had to do all the crap for my company. We sold software, and I had to go through it and the third party components plus Microsoft paperwork to ensure it was Y2K compliant. Then, I had to gin up an official Y2K certificate for our software and the company in case either were audited.

Then, there was my mother-in-law who decided to stock up on food, guns, and ammo at her house out in the country. She probably still has beans from her Y2K stash.

@TastyBits: “The authors of AGW were mathematicians, and it is based upon statistics not science. These are the same guys that assured everybody there could be no housing crisis. Thier understanding of science is about a high school level.”

@the Q: “It may be hard to quantify the anthropomorphic effect of man on climate (is it a 5% effect? 10%) but there is no question the planet is warming faster than it has in the past. Wobble or no wobble.”

They look at past climate changes, and how the forcings affected them. They can then project what would be expected, and get an idea of what ‘extra’ is happening.

I was being an asshole, but I now realize how wrong that can be. I never imagined anybody would proudly proclaim their ignorance and refusal to acquire any knowledge of a subject they would critique. I will stop there. There is science, and I have followed it. I disagree which is different from refusing to even try to learn anything about it.

Mathematical models rely upon the data and the mathematicians. I went through similar arguments prior to the housing crash and financial collapse. I (and others) was told that I was wrong. The experts knew what they were doing.

On your other point, climate changing is normal. The general trend since the end of the last Ice Age has been warming, but there have been cooling periods. I am over this subject. I am being beat up over Y2K, and I am waiting to have my last post trashed.

I have work to do and an appointment. I am sure they will have fun while I am out. Maybe, I can get that worthless pile of human fecal matter out of my head.

@TastyBits: That is not how it even works or even remotely close to what the problems were. My god man you’re clearly even more clueless of computer programming then you are about AGW. Do you just do a cursory google search and then consider yourself god of all knowledge?

It was clearly a problem and just because you worked at a level that it didn’t matter doesn’t mean everyone else did. Christ almighty you didn’t even know that computer hardware only runs at a low level because of code..

Your mother in law is just a prepper which we still have today. Those crazies lurch from one doomsday scenario to another.

@michael reynolds: Calling me names does not refute any of my arguments — it just makes you look like a third grader.

I could say Mike is a liar, ignore him, but I”m not in third grade and I can actually refute your arguments on substance and on the merits. That obviously is not the case with you – hence the namecalling.

Computer hardware works using binary code. You have bits, but unless you are a gearhead, you are usually working with bytes or multiples of them – oct, hex. The computer does all its work in decimal or some multiples. A two digit number would be 00, 01, 10, 11 or 0, 1, 2, 3.

The two digit year is allocated as a byte, and a byte is able to hold 255 numbers. The computer has no idea of what a “99” is, but it does know what 01100011 is. (If you were in assembler or machine code, you may be flipping bits, but then, this would not apply anyway.)

The advantage of higher level languages is that the hide the gory details of the hardware allowing non-gearheads to program, but that does not mean the hardware stops functioning as hardware. It is all 0’s and 1’s, truth tables, and/or, nand/nor, xand/xor. The compiler converts it into machine language, and the machine language converts it into 0’s and 1’s (close enough).

If you add a number to the 2 digit year, it gets stored correctly as long as it is less than 255.

You will have some problems. The display will only be two digits, and the input will be limited to two digits. You will also need to add 1900 to your 2-digit year. The year stored could be 120, but you would only see 20. When you add 1900 + 120, you get 2020.

At this point you’re so far off base about Y2K you’re not even wrong anymore. What part of it primarily being a software problem are you unable to comprehend? Your incoherent ramblings about hardware aren’t even relevant to the discussion.

Computer programing is to make the hardware function. Otherwise, it is just a lot of nothing. Higher level languages were developed to allow people who could not program in assembler or machine languages to be able to program also.

Computer software is useless without computer hardware, and computer hardware is binary based. Everything you see that is not a 0 or a 1 is an illusion. It is nothing more than a hunk of silicon flipping switches really fast.

In order to do what you think the computer is doing, it would need to convert binary to decimal do decimal arithmetic, and then, it would need to convert back to binary. It does not work that way.

Computer software works in the CPU and RAM mostly (caches, GPU, also), and it is stored on a HDD, SDD, FDD, USB thumb drive, punch cards, etc.

And yet I seem to remember programmers being involved in fixing Y2K. I wonder why a company would hire a COBOL programmer if it wasn’t a software issue. If only you had been around with your immense wisdom to explain how binary really worked.

So because the hardware could support 4 digit years, date comparisons of ‘990101’ and ‘000101’ didn’t need fixed? You’ve been wasting everyone’s time discussing issues you don’t remotely understand.

So because the hardware could support 4 digit years, date comparisons of ‘990101’ and ‘000101’ didn’t need fixed?

The question is meaningless because to a computer numbers are numbers. It does not know that the 4 digits are a year, and the TODATE() function is nothing more than a series of machine language instructions.

The number “990101” would not be stored in this format, and it would not be manipulated in this format. The format would only be used for input and output, but output could include external or internal interfaces. (possible breakpoint) If you added 1 year, the result will be 1000101, and there is enough space to hold this number.

If you need 2 eggs for a recipe and you go to the store, you will need to purchase a dozen in order to get the 2 eggs you need. Unless you go to a special store that only sells single eggs or you roll your own eggs, you are left with 10 extra eggs. It is the same idea.

In addition to the interfaces between software applications, there are input problems, and there are display issues. For most everyday usage, there would not be many major problems.

Some years earlier, the banks and/or financial sector (I think) had run into issues because they were forecasting long term, and the 2-digit was causing them problems. They were mostly fixed, but at least, the financial sector usually has the latest and greatest.

So, there were potential problems, and it was not a waste of time. It was just not as pervasive as people thought.

The experts that said I (and others) was wrong about the coming housing bubble bursting and the financial system collapsing. According to your logic, they were right, and I was wrong. Apparently, there was no housing bubble and no financial collapse because surely they would have listened if people had sounded the alarm. Oh wait, …

The choice of a Byte datatype would be better. You are artificially creating a byte, and you are forcing an artificial buffer overflow. The integer arithmetic would be much faster.

Understanding how the underlying hardware works would allow you to fix this by changing the datatype. Depending upon the surrounding code, this may allow you to keep the code running without having to reverse engineer 30 or 40 year old code that nobody understands.

Yet you still rambled on incoherently and brought up the irrelevant hardware again. The examples are only artificial in the sense that programmers today typically don’t use 2 digits for the year. However, they are perfect examples to show how the capabilities of the underlying hardware don’t matter.

Had you been paying attention, you might have learned something, but you think that you are a genius. Unfortunately, you are not smart enough to trick the old man who rambles incoherently.

I am sure that your mommy, daddy, nanny, wet nurse, school teachers, and others tell you how great and wonderful you are, but in the world of adults, it is performance based. We really do not give a shit about your dumb ass.

Rather than trying to dream up ways to show the world how brilliant you are, you should pick up a book. You know those things with covers and paper pages between them. You should learn a little about hardware because all software applications run on it.

And here is a little clue about coding. Few of today’s coders are worth a crap. They are sloppy as hell because the hardware allows them to be. You have no idea of why your code was so asinine or why anybody would write tight code or efficient algorithms.

A lot of it is not about saving memory. It is about CPU/clock cycles, but you would need to understand hardware to understand why that is important. When you are processing millions of records there is a big difference between a job taking a few hours and a few weeks. (By job I mean the program run not your employment.) Understanding the effects of datatypes makes a big difference. The wrong one costs extra cycles, and the extra cycles compound causing bottlenecks. When this is multiplied by a million records, it matters.

None of that is relevant to your complete and total failure to comprehend or articulate the Y2K problem. By the way, I’ll take these contradictions of yours earlier as an admission you were wrong:

For a computer, there is no buffer overflow when going from 99 to 100…If you add a number to the 2 digit year, it gets stored correctly…

fix this by changing the datatype

That was one of the programmatic fixes for Y2K that doesn’t rely on knowledge of the hardware. You agreed with everyone here without realizing what you were doing. We’ve been telling you it wasn’t a hardware problem and you just inadvertently confirmed we were correct. It’s kind of like you were a janitor at a tech company in the late 90s and are repeating things you heard, but weren’t capable of understanding.

I wouldn’t be such a dick to someone so pathetically clueless if you weren’t such a ego-maniacal blowhard.

…and a million records is not a lot, and a long time is seconds vs milliseconds

What you tried to do was to trap me with an artificial problem. The code was asinine to begin with, but apparently, you are too stupid to understand how dumb it is. I went around your trap, and if you had any brains, you would have been able to figure out the coding issue with my solution.

You are a child who has been told all his live how great and wonderful he is. The hard, cold truth is that you are an idiot. You cannot even create a decent trap, and then, you cannot catch the half-assed solution.

Date storage would be a problem, but as I stated, there would be problems. Your example is still worthless. You would use the language’s date-time functions, or you would have rolled your own. Either way, your code would have continued to run.

Assuming you were storing the date in a database column of a date-time datatype, you could change it. Depending upon the make, model, and year of your database, you may need to do some extra work, but it is not difficult. If it is stored as an Integer, you can run a SQL Statement to Update the column.

An adult’s 2-digit code using date-time functions would still work. The variable would have been declared correctly, and the date-time function would have returned the year.

I thought this thread was about Florida’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus on global warming. How did this become a thread about a >15 year old and already completely solved and thus irrelevant computer software problem? I’m guessing a wanker couldn’t debate the science and so diverted the discussion to his preferred wankery, but I can’t be bothered to read all of irrelevance.

@TastyBits: Cobol and fortran don’t work with bits or bytes they are what’s called a high level programming language and if you have only two places reserved in memory it’s going to roll over and break everything.

Working at the bit/byte level is called low level programming and that’s stuff like assembly.

@Grewgills: Well Tastybits brought up Y2K as an example of another hoax similar to AGW on another site that was linked here. I just mentioned it because a fellow who thought Y2K was a hoax is clearly not to be trusted as he’s not grounded in reality.

Unfortunately Tastybits then proceeded to try to prove as much as possible that he’s not nearly as informed as he thinks he is. I’m pretty sure the fellow has read some links on google and now thinks he’s qualified as an expert programmer and climate scientist.

@TastyBits: “On your other point, climate changing is normal. The general trend since the end of the last Ice Age has been warming, but there have been cooling periods. I am over this subject. I am being beat up over Y2K, and I am waiting to have my last post trashed.”

Hello, my name is ‘TastyBits’, and I don’t understand rates of change.